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Imagine you’re in a game with one objective: a bestselling product or service. The rules? No marketing budget, no PR stunts, and it must be sustainably successful. No short-term fads.

This is not a game of chance. It is a game of skill and strategy.

And it begins with a single question: given competing products of equal pricing, promotion, and perceived quality, why does one outsell the others?

The answer doesn’t live in the sustainably successful products or services. The answer lives in those who use them.

Our goal is to craft a strategy for creating successful users. And that strategy is full of surprising, counter-intuitive, and astonishingly simple techniques that don’t depend on a massive marketing or development budget. Techniques typically overlooked by even the most well-funded, well-staffed product teams.

Every role is a key player in this game. Product development, engineering, marketing, user experience, support—everyone on the team. Even if that team is a start-up of one. Armed with a surprisingly overlooked science and a unique POV, we can can reduce the role of luck. We can build sustainably successful products and services that rely not on unethical persuasive marketing tricks but on helping our users have deeper, richer experiences. Not just in the moments while they’re using our product but, more importantly, in the moments when they aren’t.

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From the Publisher

Badass: Making Users Awesome

Do the enduring successful products and services share common attributes? Can we learn by studying them? Can we reverse-engineer “sustainable success”? Not exactly.

The answers to what makes a sustainable bestseller aren’t in the successful product. The answers are in the successful product’s users. It’s not the product success that matters most, it’s the successful results of those who use it. Repeatedly. Consistently. Sustainably.

The answer to a sustainable bestseller is to shift the focus from making an awesome product to making an awesome user of that product. The answer lies is helping users become badass not just at using the product, but at whatever it is the product can help them do and be. And some of those answers are surprising, counterintuitive, but can be implemented by anyone at any stage in a product’s development. Even if you can’t improve your product, you can still improve your user’s experience by designing for what happens after they use it.

Badass: Making Users Awesome is a course in how to create a context in which users can become more skillful, and, most importantly, to stay motivated to keep moving forward. Everything our users experience is part of that context, and even the smallest improvements can have a dramatic impact.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"In BADASS: Making Users Awesome, Kathy Sierra -- one of our brightest business minds -- offers up a surprising insight into what makes certain offerings shine in a competitive marketplace. Believe it or not, many people don't care how awesome your product is. Instead, they care about how awesome they are when they use your product. If you can tap into that motivation, you've got gold. This books shows you how."

-- Daniel H. Pink, author of To Sell is Human and DRIVE

"Every once in a while, someone comes along who sees the world more clearly, and helps you to do the same. Every time I read Kathy Sierra, or hear her speak, I feel smarter, more thoughtful, and more caring. She has that gift of making everyone around her better. But what's even more special, the "better" she helps you with is the ability to help other people get better! Genius!"

-- Tim O'Reilly, Founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media

"Kathy Sierra wants you to understand this: If your users like themselves better when they use what you make, they'll recommend it with a fervor money simply cannot buy. No one gets this more clearly than Sierra, and "Badass" is her way of helping you get it too."

-- Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus

"Your users will love you for reading this book and following Sierra's

advice."

"A smart, fast read on how to make great products."

-- Scott Berkun, author of The Myths of Innovation and Confessions of A Public Speaker

About the Author

Kathy Sierra created the award-winning Head First series that has sold over 1 million copies, and includes the longest-running tech bestsellers of the past decade. Her background is in developing education games and software for the motion picture industry, and she also created the first interaction design courses for UCLA Entertainment Studies. For more than 15 years she's been helping large companies, small start-ups, non-profits, and educators rethink their approach to user experience, and build sustainable, genuine loyalty.

Top customer reviews

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I just finished this book. The idea is very well structured. It is written in a way that follows its own advice. Show the convincing implication first, refer to other experts' ideas, present progress bar, etc. It made me to write a review about the book at the end, because I felt awesome after finishing the book.

It does refer a collection of books as one-star reviewer said, but the way I see is how she connected them to form one "product", which what I mean by that, is this book. The final product is much more powerful than the sum of individual ones. It is similar to what I felt with iPhone in early days - Apple didn't invent any of individual technologies used. They found right combination of existing technologies and ideas to build a product they envisioned, IMHO.

I didn't buy Kindle version. I can see reading this on a kindle can be challenging.

I am surprised that this book does not have thousands of 5 stars yet. Adding one toward that now.

Overall, Kathy Sierra explains user-centered design in an unconventional and compelling manner. The book reads fairly quickly, and may be good backup to clients and team members when working on product and service design projects. She gives good detail on why even good products and/or services can fail in the marketplace, and the steps taken to correct this.

Brilliant book about product design. The pictures and examples make it easy and enjoyable to read. Kathy Sierra is an excellent communicator and her approach to product development is excellent. It has helped shape the way that I approach my work as a software engineer. I have recommended it to friends in my field and they have also said that it helped them in the same way.

This book truly gets me thinking in a different direction and I really like it. The author basically says that it's common for companies to design and sell their products as the center of the universe, when the center of the universe really is the user. The author teaches that products/services are tools that people need to reach a bigger goal, and there is more then one product/service that will help the user achieve this bigger goal.

For example, let's say you want to become really good at photography. You buy a camera, a tripod, books on the subject, and Adobe Photoshop all in hopes of becoming bad-ass at photography. However, if any of those tools fail to help you achieve this bigger goal either the user will find a tool that does or just give up feeling the entire process has been made to hard and maybe even too expensive.

The author goes on to outline how to help users achieve their goal through your product/service. Basically, she outlines a teach method that research has shown to work really well for people in general.

This is one book that stays on my bookshelf, because I will read it again. As it has been a great asset in developing my overall skills in user experience design.

If you read no other book on usability and building customers for life, READ THIS ONE. It will change the way you think about users, their context and how to get and keep them. HINT: It's not about your tool / app / website!